English 486 Integrated ELA Blog

I initially chose this book because the title and imagery on the cover looked fun and interesting, and I was not disappointed. I’m glad that I picked this book, because there are a few chapters that I would love to borrow techniques and ideas from. There most likely will be challenges to using a number of these ideas, however. One could be that the school you’re teaching at doesn’t approve of the texts you want to use or doesn’t feel that the curriculum needs to change. There’s also the possibility of parents not liking the idea of their children watching cartoons at school. Chapter 1                “What you get is what you see”. According to the text, the primary literacy of the 21 st century is visual. Not only do students need to learn and process words, but pictures as well. This chapter also discusses how seeing is also connected to remembering, and that the brain processes images exponentially fast...

I found the text reading this time around to be interesting and a bit of a refresher. Something that I, as well as many others, might not have considered much is the fact that communication could be viewed or interpreted differently based on which cultural or conventional lens you use. Taking a comment from our guest speaker a few weeks ago, she noticed that in Western classrooms, silence was viewed negatively as not understanding, while in her Japanese classrooms, it was a mixture of time to process, and politeness for the previous speaker. It really makes you realize how important it is to learn what the norms are for the community that you will be teaching in, so that your transition as a new teacher will be smoother. I also had a bit of a refresher when the book started going over the seven parts of verbal presentation on page 134. I took a speech class at my junior college, and posture, movement, gestures, eye contact, voice, volume, and pitch were gone over multiple times. Voic...